Glass panels are utilized in a wide range of industries, including window, door, and insulated glass unit manufacturing for commercial and residential construction. Additional applications include architectural glass, building renovations, and specialty interior applications, including custom framing and displays. Across these applications, glass pane shipping, handling, and transportation considerations raise a number of design challenges, particularly when shipping unframed (sheet) glass units in different sizes and quantities.
In general, sheet glass units are initially manufactured in standard sizes, and delivered in fixed quantities. This allows for the use of modular shipping containers, with predefined external dimensions and uniform internal packing geometry, in order to reduce breakage and also production and handling costs.
Glass units are often stacked vertically during shipping and transfer operations, in fixed-quantity sets corresponding to the predefined capacity of the standardized shipping container. This produces a fully-packed interior container geometry. The vertically aligned glass sheets are supported against the side or end walls during transportation, limiting relative movement and reducing losses. Spacers may also be utilized, and the stacks of glass may be wrapped to reduce relative displacement, for example with a shrink-wrap or heat sensitive plastic sheet material.
In some industries, however, individual unit sizes vary. In addition, as the supply chain moves from large-scale glass sheet production toward individual wholesale and retail delivery, shipping quantities must be filled on the basis of customer demand, rather than container size. This is particularly true in custom window and door manufacturing, and in framing and display applications, where there is no guarantee or even expectation that individual customer orders will correspond to the pre-defined numbers and sizes used in larger-scale glass sheet containers.
When different quantities of glass are to be shipped, therefore, additional packaging and handling time is required, in order to ensure safe delivery of customer orders that do not conform to standard shipping container dimensions. Where cost and efficiency are market factors, this raises a number of design considerations, particularly as directed to shipping glass sheets and other fragile items in non-standard unit sizes and quantities.